Making sense of our ongoing social catastrophe. (An Orthosphere blog.)

February 10, 2014

The Crisis of Modernity is the Falseness of Modernity

Modernity offered, in contrast to the experiential paradigm of the vast majority of human history, a very different vision of man, society, in the universe. As such, it needed a narrative to establish the legitimacy of its vision, which we may summarize thusly:

Primitive man lived in darkness and ignorance, kept their by religious superstition-peddlers. We enlightened thinkers and scientists succeeded in liberating man from his squalor and have set him along the path toward his gradual perfection.

This narrative may have been believable in the 17th and 18th centuries. We, today, know better. Man's liberation from religion has not perfected him. It has loosed horrors beyond counting on the world.

The "crisis of modernity," as such, is the spontaneous recognition of the falseness of this narrative -- and therefore the falseness of everything which has come to be because of it, including our social order, our ethical life, and our self-understanding.

Because modernity is false (and everyone knows it), it cannot be sustained. There are only two options: to return to that which is normative, historical, spontaneous, and organic, that is, to religion, to the traditional family, and various other institutions; or else to soldier on ahead, dropping only those parts of the modern condition that clearly cannot be salvaged.

Western society by and large has chosen the latter course. It has elected to drop, among other things, the idea of a coherent narrative; indeed, it is now characterized by suspicion or distrust of narratives. This, we call "postmodernism." It has also jettisoned its concern for reason, rationality, and the realness of reality. This, too, is part of postmodernism; we call it "deconstructionism." It has retained everything else of modernity, including its parousiasm and dialectic historicism.

But modernism-lite is really no more sustainable than was modernism-regular.

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But modernism-lite is really no more sustainable than was modernism-regular.

The few times I venture into the sphere of EpiscoPresbyLutherans, I usually encounter their questions of why people are leaving faster than if their churches were on fire. Demographic winter is a big reason as one Lutheran pastor noted, but the other is that the Left continues to gain an increasing share in this diminishing market. And they would sooner let the denomination die than admit that the progressivet-modernist narrative is rotten to the core. Of course there are plenty of Catholics with this death-before-orthodoxy attitude. I have in mind Bishop Clark of the Diocese of Rochester, who has been in the process of an astounding scorched-earth policy before his retirement (hopefully in 208 days on the dot).

"Modernity was in some ways a vast hallucination. For ten generations, it threw up terrifying shapes and aroused strange enthusiasms, all the while making promises of limitless power and knowledge. Then, almost suddenly, it was gone, as transient and inconsequent as a thunderstorm. It is only when the world of time seems to be collapsing, when all philosophy has refuted itself and the philosophers have taken to composing panegyrics for the victors, that the truth behind history can again become visible. " Spengler's Future

Modernism and Liberalism are dead men walking. They will soon follow the Shakers. Like the Shakers, they preach demographic suicide; so that's what will happen to them.

Modernism being dead, what can we say of the reaction thereto? Is it dead, too, if the ideas against which it reacts are dead and disappearing? I.e., is not the reactionary, traditionalist impulse no longer counter-revolutionary, no longer about resisting the modern, but rather about something altogether different than what has gone before? Is it not as if the modern era had dropped out of history, and we found ourselves back in the liminal phase at the end of the High Medieval Synthesis, when something new was preparing to be born - something other than Modernism? What is that something? What does the High Medieval Synthesis become, with Ockham and his heirs deleted from the mix, as seems to be their determined intent?

Are they dead? I take a dim view of that notion. It doesn't matter if liberals don't reproduce. As Bonald noted once, they've gotten very good at stealing and raising our own children.

As for what might succeed post/modernity -- who's to say? Whatever it would be would have to develop organically. I'm not sure such would ever happen though; I increasingly incline toward the view that this whole mess will end when the second coming of Christ puts a stop to it, and no sooner.